


Morals & Practicals

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: 19th Century, Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, F/M, Homophobia, Identity Issues, Ireland, M/M, Manchester, Misogyny, Murder, Organized Crime, POV First Person, Pastiche, Period Typical Attitudes, Pre-Canon, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Revenge, Sex Work, Stealth RPF, Threesome - M/M/M, Torture, Victorian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-25 11:50:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17120822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Which it is the True Autobiography of the man who became Cornelius Hickey, As Told to a Discreet & Confidential Gentleman.





	Morals & Practicals

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disenchanted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/gifts).



> \- to wish my darling disenchanted a merry Christmas, this little touch of Hickey in the night.
> 
> *

I am a haberdasher, but I know how to stick it to a man so he dies.

When he could get work, my father was a meat-market porter, except he wasn’t my father. I don’t remember anyone telling me that, yet there was never a time I didn’t know it. We couldn’t afford dark secrets and dramatic revelations, not in Back Irk Street. 

This was the story, as far as I knew it: my mother had her fill of blows, and one day she bolted. It was nigh on a year when she crawled back, too big to work the only trade she’d been able to find. Her husband tried to kick it out of her, and so he did, but it was born live, and clung to life, and it was me. He, my brothers and sister were black-browed high-coloured people, fat when the going was good and raw-boned when it was not, and I am, well, I am as you see. I look half-clemmed at the best of times, but I can clem half to death and not look any worse, or feel it very badly. 

My mother didn’t die straight away. She lived long enough, on the pallet at the back of our cellar-dwelling, to tell my sister Mary Ann that my father was an Irishman, a tramping labourer, that they call a spalpeen, who the night he got me sang to her: 

As I was standing on the platform high  
My aged father was standing by,  
My aged father did me deny  
And the name he gave me was the Croppy Boy.  


And that meant I was born to be hanged, but I don’t see how my mother could know rightly who got me, because she had been a whore. 

My earliest memory is of being beaten. Not by the man who was not my father, though he was to furnish me with many such subsequent, but by the woman who nursed me, and all the kids of the street whose mothers had died or could not take them to their places of work, and who, when we were weaned, watched us. Her methods of nurture depended chiefly upon on gripe-water, to which elixir I became a notorious addict. One day when her back was turned, I climbed to the high shelf on which the preparation was kept, stole it away to the coalshed and necked the lot. Had I, at three years of age, my present propensity to become aloof and melancholy in my cups, I should certainly have been poisoned and died. But I came rampaging through the tenement, using all the choicest language of my own hearth, colliding finally with nurse's apron and petticoats, over which I puked fulsomely. Or so I was told. It is the thrashing I remember, six on the bare bottom with the ridged side of a butter pat; I daresay her arm was strengthened with relief, that she had not to tell a family that their child, disliked and unwanted bastard though it was, had perished in her care, but it was nonetheless a sharp line ruled under my infancy. She would not have me back, and so I got under everyone's feet at home, growing used to cuffs that, if less measured, were also easier to evade. 

I was about eight years old the first time I ran away. I’m blowed I stuck it so long, now I reflect. I marched up to Carson’s mill on my short legs and asked were they taking on any scavengers, but they had plenty and enough in the paupers the churchwardens brought them, and in any case I was too young, you had to be nine years of age and I scarcely looked five. But knowing no better, I had given my right name, so Mary Ann found me before two nights were out. Her Da had been drunk the night before so he hadn’t noticed me gone, which was well for me. I don’t know why Mary Ann minded me. She didn’t like me. Maybe it was because it was her that my mother told whose son I was. 

I had to bide my time and make more of a plan, and besides Mary Ann was watching me now. So it was some many months before I ran away again. By this time I knew something of the life of an apprentice mill hand, sleeping in dormitories, not stopping work even to eat and being read to from tracts, and wanted none of it. In the mean time I followed my brothers and their father to the dead meat market and watched the butchers dismantling the great corpses of oxen, pigs and sheep. I got little bits and pieces of work, for which I was usually paid in offal. 

When I ran away this second time, I made sure it was summer, so I could sleep out of doors, and I made a better fist at it: held horses, ran messages, carried parcels and swept crossings. At the last I excelled, knowing it seemed by instinct how to approach a timid gentlewoman in the guise of a starveling angel, admire her gown or Paisley shawl, and intimate to her most sweetly what a great pity it would be to see it draggled and spoilt with the ash in the kennel. 

I took on the first of many aliases: the name I chose had a grand solid sound, it made me swell to say it. I did a deal of fighting, for there is a sort of Trades Union among boys of the street, and (as ministers’ wives and such like people are wont to think of the associations proper, which is not true) the dues are paid in blood. I did some prigging too, but though I look very like the common idea of a pickpocket, I found myself not so much of a proficient at it as would free me of fear of being taken up. I was a talker, and a dirty scrapper, that ever drew too much attention to myself for the effective practice of larceny. At this time I slept in low doss-houses if it rained, or ruralized under a hawthorn on Green Heys Fields on the hot dry nights. If it was not a fine life it was at least a free one, with no masters to answer to, and men undervalue that. I grew very dirty and ragged, and lousy too, but apart from the itching that does not concern a boy. 

It could not last. My sister found me again. She boxed my ear by way of good day, and said, what will you do when winter comes? You cannot come back, he’ll wring your neck for the shame you’ve heaped on us atop your birth. 

I shrugged. Winter was as distant to me as Doomsday. 

She told me to come to Hulme churchyard in two days’ time, at this same hour, and she would have something for me. I almost did not go, but curiosity overcame my natural waywardness. 

Mary Ann met me there with a lady, dressed fine in the style of those days, with feathers wagging in her bonnet and her taffeta arms blown up like mauve balloons. This was Mrs Gaddass, that used to be Esther who worked in the mill with Mary Ann. She kept a small-ware shop, and was in want of a boy to run messages and the like. She gave out she was a respectable widow but in fact a few years before an officer of hussars had got her in the family way, and was enough of a gentleman to give her seventy pound before he was ordered away, with which she set up the shop, and the baby was born dead so all was well. 

Mary Ann put a little purse of money into Mrs Gaddass’s hand, which seemed the wrong way about to me, knuckled my head, but friendly, and said now she should have to marry a mill-owner’s son if she wanted to get out of her father’s house. 

I said I’d pray for her, which was a pretty, empty thing I’d heard in a story that a lettered fellow read to us boys in the doss-house once. She clipped my ear in earnest then and said didn’t I know I hadn’t been christened because Da wouldn’t pay the fee for a Milesian tramp’s get, and a prayer from a pagan such as me would d—n her for certain. Mrs Gaddass put a small piece of lacy stuff to her lips and squealed, but it was all my eye, for she never had me christened either though she sent me and her housemaid to church for show while—so she she said—she read a divine service to herself at home, but if she did marchpane and gin were her Body and Blood. 

Mary Ann told me to be a good boy, and serve my mistress well, and walked away. I never saw her again, nor her father and my brothers. They all died the next year, when the cholera spread through the cellars and tenements. 

The next few were the softest years of my life, though I hope for softer, white sands and breadfruit. Mrs Gaddass was a piece of work, full of caprice and silliness. She rarely beat me, and when she did it seemed it was rather to gratify her own whim than to improve my conduct, so I grew very full of myself. As soon as I arrived in her house, she had her servant bathe me, crop my lousy hair and gave me two suits of clean clothes that fit, a plain broadcloth for the working week and a velveteen for Sunday. I was taught my prayers and letters and how to figure. I had sufficient food, which I never had known before, and slept in a bed in the attic, that I shared with the maid. This girl, Lavinia, was perhaps three or four years my senior, but she looked to my childish eye a woman entire, with big bubs into which she would squash my face for fun, and tickle me, and tease me till I kissed her good night. I did not like it, and yet I tolerated it, because it was warmth in the winter and kindly meant. 

About the time my voice first started to crack, Lavinia said she had a present for me, and I was to close my eyes and hold out my hand. She hugged me against her and put my fingers somewhere hot and oily. I opened my eyes and saw she was sat on the bed before me with her petticoats thrown up, and my hand was stuck in the seamy, hairy pouch between her legs. I was not innocent as a boy from a respectable household might be, but in truth I was perplexed, and knew not what to do. I said, I think this is a gift you have given yourself, not for me at all. She was very affronted at that, said she had over-esteemed me because I seemed so quick and full of repartees, I was still too young for this great treasure she had purposed for me, for she was a good girl and still untouched. She pulled back, her c—t made a great trumpeting sound and I fell down laughing. She didn’t talk to me for a fortnight. 

But when she made it up to me, she did it sweetly, wrapping her arms about me and touching my p—k until it stood, then taking it in her mouth until it spent. And so I had to put my hand into her slit again, and suckle her bare bubs, for fair exchange is no robbery, but it disgusted me worse this time. Most men look back on such initiations with a rosy glow, but poor Lavinia picked the wrong subject for her forays into the worship of Venus. It would be another year or so before I understood I was rather made for Mars, but the next day I went to Mrs Gaddass and told her how Lavinia disported herself before me as she was undressing a-nights, and I feared I would not be able to put a brake and controul upon my youthful lusts. She pressed me to her rustling yellow frontage and I took alarm, thinking I had let myself in for more of it, but she was weeping, the sentimental b—h, for my natural honesty. I nearly choked on the reek of lily-of-the-valley and feminine sweat, but Lavinia was dismissed that afternoon, and I had the attic to myself, king of my little world, for the crone to whom Mrs Gaddass gave Lavinia’s situation preferred the kitchen nook. 

I ran many messages to Hulme Barracks, for soldiers love to buy trifles for themselves and their women, and one day a friendly redcoat said he would give me sixpence to step into the sentrybox with him, and he kissed me and got his member out for me to tug off, which I did with relish for the silver that spurted from his p—k as much as that of the coin. It got around the regiment that the haberdasher’s boy, not pretty but effeminate enough that a man wouldn’t feel too sodomitical for it, would gamahuche for a small consideration, not that it did me any good, as I will shortly relate. I wouldn’t be b—red, though, as that was not my fancy, and though I was a proper fellow of my hands when matched with a boy, I couldn’t take on grown men used to fighting. Thus I learnt the gentle art of blackmail. There was one aged ensign who liked me to sod him, and for every shilling I made atop his skinny shanks, I made half-a-crown in threatening to inform upon him to Brass. 

The Barracks sometimes visited Mrs Gaddass too, and so she came again to be with child, but this time she was was not so fortunate, for this gallant hussar denied her, and the birth made her sickly, as the child was too. Soon she was spending all her profit on quacks and nostrums for herself and the brat. She found my little store and took that, then accused me of theft and slapped my face. I said it was gotten honestly, tips for services rendered, so she slapped me again and called me names that suggested my reputation among the cavalry had reached her ear. 

She turned me out and I became in very earnest what she called me, a masculine whore and a thief. I was seventeen years of age, more or less as tall and as broad as I shall ever be. I was seen now not as a boy but as a man, though a puny one, and a miss Molly too, that was easy to swindle or knock down, unless I showed some steel. Showing was usually enough, but a handful of times I wounded and was wounded with the blade I kept in my boot. I never injured a man but in self-defence, but it is true that self-defence has sometimes the character of anticipation. I did not evade the law entirely, however, and was twice sentenced to prison, once for disorderly vagrancy and once for affray. Every man should go to gaol at some time in his life: he would learn how little different it is from waged work, except he is largely relieved of worry about the morrow. 

It was during my second sojourn in the New Bailey that I made the acquaintance of Hector Burns. He was a few years older than I, who then was twenty-one or thereabouts; he was well-formed and handsome, and even on the prison diet had rounded limbs and a broad strong chest. He wore swags of chestnut hair to his chin, his brown eyes were large and lustrous, his lips red coral, his speech merry, fiery and eloquent. At first I did not comprehend the sensations that overtook me in Hector’s presence. I had never experienced them before. I was his shadow, his dog. I would have laid down my life for him, and did, or rather I laid down another’s, my own not being available. But I shall come to that in a moment. 

Hector was a revolutionary. He would speak to any who would listen of the equality, freedom and brotherhood of all men, the overthrow of monarchies, the hypocrisy of religion, the necessity of destroying masters and capital. This talk earned him hours on the treadmill, but he did not recant it, and would chant, _May never a cock in England Crow, Nor never a Pipe in Scotland blow, Nor never a Harp in Ireland Play, Till Liberty regains her Sway!_ to keep time. He had a curious habit of smoking dried-out tobacco rolled in thin paper, which he said they did in Paris, where you could buy papers made for the purpose, though he was obliged to use newspaper and bits of spills. I copied him in this at first out of blind devotion, but soon addicted myself to these cigarets, which are deliciously hot, brief and intense, compared to the muddy, dank bubble of a pipe. 

We were released within a week of one another, and had agreed to meet and pal together, see a bit more of the wide world. On our first night as free men we bedded down under a hedge, not liking the casual wards as too much of what we had just left. The night was not warm, and at first I did not understand Hector’s intention when he put his arms about me. Then he murmured my name, and tilted up my chin. If I hadn’t been flat on my back I would have fainted away with joy. I’m not wrong, am I, he said anxiously, I saw the way you looked at me, and you never talked of lasses. But I didn’t want nothing hole and corner in the clink. 

We d—n near devoured each other under that hedge. Like a lot of good-natured, well-endowed fellows I’ve known, who have nothing much to prove to themselves or anyone else, Hector relished the passive part, and so we were well fit to one another. If these extensions of the amity that you gentlemen profess to your cousins, brothers-in-law and college chums disgust you, well, your cavaulting and scrimmage with women disgust me, and you have Law, Church and Custom upon your side, where I and others like me must make shift for ourselves, and who is to say has the right of it? 

We resolved to tramp to London, but first, Hector said, there is someone I wish you to meet. It seemed he was taking me home, for we went toward Angel Meadows, and I laughed and said, there’s no-one here I don’t already know, except the dead and the Paddies new off the packet. Well, that’s the thing, he reply’d, and we turned into the Weaver’s Arms, where he hallooed a sturdy, dark-haired, farrantly lass scrubbing tables, lifted her high off her feet and nuzzled her bosom as she kicked up her little heels, which did nothing to endear her to me. 

As he set her down she turned her bright blue eye on me, and told me in the flat accent of Tipperary or East Cork to smile, or I’d turn the porter in the barrels itself. A fortnight back she'd have kissed the scowl off me herself, she said, but she was bent on higher things, she had a prospect now. She did, too. The ribbons in her hair were subtle-coloured watered silk, and her collar good Devonshire lace, pinned with a fine cameo. I must have glowered very black at her, because she threw back her head laughing and made open allusion to the relation that subsisted between Hector and me, without a whit of condemnation in her words. I had known Irish girls rail, scold and curse, but never speak so loose and free as this one did. I liked her for it through the blaze of my jealousy. 

Hector put his arm about her small waist and said we must not quarrel, we’d get on famously in a moment, how could we not: his great particular friend and his own darling Mary? She brought us pints of black porter to quench our thirst and tots of whiskey to toast our release, and Hector asked her what was this prospect of hers or was she just codding? 

Only, said she, puffing up like a pigeon does in the snow, the son and heir to the Victoria Mill in Salford, what was come from Prooshia itself. 

Hector bellowed and said the man would never marry her; he’d never thought a niece of his (here I gained a measure of relief, though in Angel Meadows one could never be certain) could be such a goose. I thought for the first time in many years of my own sister’s last words to me, that she must marry a mill-owner's son to get out of her father's house, and shivered as if that very bird had traversed my grave. 

Mary looked most indignant and said that marriage enslaved women for the protection of capital and property, she’d clatter any man who proposed it to her. If we stayed to eat dinner we would meet Fred, she said: she was showing him the people whom his father’s firm exploited, and the condition in which they lived, and he would write it all up in the papers, then in a book, which would ignite a revolution in England’s mill-towns. He was the genius of his age, she said, he would change politics and economical science forever. 

For all her talk Fred did not cut much of a figure. Lower in stature even than I, despite having had every advantage of life, and of much the same build, he was extremely short-sighted, and sprayed his listeners with spittle as he expostulated in his improbable accent, which was about two parts native Prussian to one part mincing nob, tinged about with particles of Lancashire and Mary’s Munster. But he was difficult to dislike all the same; he paid for everything whilst cheerfully bemoaning his poverty. When I certainly identified his lamb-skin gloves as of Woodstock manufacture, naming the likely glover, and described the peculiar process by which the leather is made workable through the application of pure, he swept them off and pressed them into my hands as a gift. The trade expertise of the worker was of all knowledge the most valuable, he said, he wished he had the head for it, adding with a nervous giggle, and the stomach. Indeed, his face had gone a trifle green. 

We stayed with Mary about a fortnight. Her rooms above the Weaver’s Arms were as salubrious as anything Little Ireland had to offer or I had yet inhabited, paid for by Fred, who kept a proper gentleman’s establishment elsewhere, to which Mary could not be admitted and which she seemed not to resent. She washed and mended our clothes for the tramp south, and gave us the name and address of a man known to her mother, that had fled Limerick after the '98 and now ran a lodging-house in the East End. I wonder if anything ever came of Fred’s book. I doubt it. His kind never follow through. 

The tramp took Hector and I near five weeks, and was full of incident which pertains not closely to my tale, so I shall leave it aside. But one thing shall I say: as we crossed London Bridge, very stained and weary, it was brought suddenly to mind how callow a place we had left, in both its hopes and despairs how green, despite the filth of slums and manufactories. London was ancient, storied and piled on, fathomless, malignant. The Thames surged beneath us, rippling like old skin over young muscle. This place wants us dead, said I. Hector threw his arm about my neck, squeezed me to him, and said we’ll thwart it and slit its throat, disgorging the gold in its belly—what sullen southron town is a match for men of the north such as we? 

At last we arrived at the house to which Mary had directed us, which was the sort of doss-place frequented by dockers and seamen. We were met at the door by a stout, fair young man of about my own years, wearing moleskins and a loud tawdry weskit with clumsy bone buttons. Hector said we sought Cornelius Hickey, and this person reply’d, with a shy, ingenuous smile, very charming, You’re looking at him. 

That smile! It was both our fortune and downfall, and now it is curiously made my fortune again. We coined it richly from Con Hickey’s facility to make men trust in him, lost it all from the same, and now it is most strangely regained by me. The doss-house belonged to his grand-uncle, that was the old Croppy to whom Mary recommended us, who was blind and all but bedridden. But now his grand-nephew and namesake ran it as a cover for other activities. He had a thumb in every pie but one, and that was cunny pie: he had the queerest veneration for women, even the lowest drab on the street was the Blessed Virgin to him, and he would not see her degraded. 

In the shortest of time we became a sort of three-headed beast. Aye, and sometimes a three-backed one too, what of it? Though Con was never very hearty in the commissions and emissions, he used like to sit and look on with the organ he called his "lad" in his hand. Each night we shared a bed built in the reign of the first King James, Hector always in the middle and us two smaller fellows using his breast as a bolster. 

And by day, we committed fraud. Docks are a fine place from which to pilfer and skim off: delivery notes might be forged, directing goods from their lawful destination, or bills written for cargoes that did not exist, or describing quite another shipment than the one changing hands. I will not give you our secrets, but we seldom had fewer than half a dozen projects going at once. Con was our leader, the fresh face of our enterprize, Hector its brawn. I was the man who would do anything, of whom it might be said, in a deserted warehouse or within the slimy embrace of a low bridge, that he was a law unto himself, none could account for what he might take it into his head to do, a very necessary character for criminal undertakings. 

One thing more I must say of Con Hickey: he could not read nor write a word, and yet he forged all the papers we used to pull off our schemes. He drew most beautifully, could put a straw into a patch of tar and sketch a portrait or a landscape on the ground, and likewise he drew, not wrote, the documents with which we stole all manner of things: tinned meat, spiritous liquors, bales of cloth, tobacco, gimcrack jewellery, and once, a crate full of cylinders for barrel organs. He used to ask me to read to him from the illustrated weeklies, since men who fence goods often have time to kill. I asked him, upon one of these occasions, how could he keep copying the shapes and not come to some cognizance of what they signified, and he reply’d that the habit of incuriosity was thrashed into him, thus. 

His mother and father had been great for Emancipation, and still, so far as he knew, stumped on their aged limbs to the Liberator’s monster meetings for Repeal of the Union. They were determined to bring up their little Cornelius to betterment, according to the precepts given down by that great man, which they understood to mean that Erse would ruin all his hopes, and not a word of it should be spoken in his presence, only An Bearla, which is the name we give your baby jargon, he said, chuckling and poking at my ribs. And did he venture to speak the language that was his grandparents’ sole one, as of many in his townland, he was whipped. So he learned not to hear when folk spoke in Erse, and to this day, he said, plumply complacent and proud of his ignorance, I have not a word of the Irish to my tongue, except my own name, which is Conchobar Ó hÍceadha. So, you see, I am practised in the art of understanding yet not, knowing a thing and not knowing it, and I took it to school with me. 

I suppose that was why he found it so easy to betray us: in his mind, he both did, and did not. Like many’s the young man making his way in a life of vice and crime, Hector, Con and I had, together and separately, trodden upon some venerable and hairy toes, and when we were roistering up in our room in the tall Limehouse place their hirelings came to tell us so. Con thrust out the cushioned hip beneath his gaudy checked weskit and said, Got any tips for a first-timer, bully boys? They growled some impotent response and slunk away, and we thought we had been very smart in this exchange, for a few days later arrived an invitation to parley. 

It was a snare. The greatest of lies ever told about thieves is the one concerning honour among ‘em—that they harm only their own, that they do not come copper on one another. We make a great show of detesting narks and noses—it is the one unforgivable insult among us—precisely that we might use the constables at our own convenience, to dispose of our enemies. How, after all, would we come to have so many words in the cant for the activity of snitching and its perpetrators, if it were never done? 

Hector was taken, Con escaped through a window onto the roofs. And I? I was not there. Thinking myself a great swell, I had determined to arrive a little tardy, in a cab, but one of the cabhorses threw a shoe, and it being wet weather and a black fog, not another conveyance was to be had for sovereigns. So my lofty quarter-hour of retard became an hour and three-quarters, and my salvation: I arrived at the appointed place to find it turned over and empty. The tapster in the public-house next door told me what had happened, and, fearing to return to our lodgings even, I made to flee with the clothes on my back and a few shillings in my purse. I was a pauper once more, extra-muralizing in Middlesex. I did not at this time guess the part that Con Hickey had played in my undoing, thinking he was in the same case as myself, and if we met again we might commiserate. 

It was ten weeks before Hector came to trial, and I judged it might be safe to venture into the city. I wore, somewhat enforcedly and for the first time since my tramp to London, a beard, and I looked, to judge from glimpses in puddles and glazed windows, not much like myself. 

Gentlemen and ladies who wish an account of proceedings in the Old Bailey, with telling slants and touches of local colour, might have it from other pens or lips than mine. Or they might go to the public galleries and see it for themselves. I waited late into the afternoon, almost to the end of the session, before I saw Hector haggard but defiant in the dock, scanning the gallery for a friendly face, but much as I tried to make myself apparent to him, our eyes met not. After twenty minutes of testimony and questions the jury retired for five, returning with a resounding _guilty_. The bewigged belwether then pronounced his sentence: transportation for a term of fourteen years. A Scotch voice behind me said with satisfaction, braw lad, to Bermuda he’ll go. Having heard of the horrors of the hulks there and the building of the Dockyard, I leapt up with the thought of doing violence on the fat greasy Jock, but met only stares at my impetuous movement, which brought me to the reflexion that, myself in all likelihood a wanted man, starting a brawl in the galleries of the Old Bailey was not going to do me good. When I turned again back to the court, Hector was taken down, and any hope of us meeting again in this life diminished to near nothing. 

Outside, among the throng, I saw Hickey. He saw me too, and pretended he did not, to look through me, as if I were not a man at all. I knew then, in an instant and by instinct, how the case had fallen out. I followed him to Limehouse, and intercepted him as he climbed the steps to his uncle’s house with a cordial invitation to walk the canal path with me. He seemed inclined at first to refuse, but I flashed him a sharp bright smile, and he came willingly enough then, and we strolled arm-in-arm into the evening. 

He was not happy. His new masters had put him to the trade he hated most, that of flashman to a bawdy house, but he would evade them that very night, he said. Oh, said I very cool, how? Well, he said, with a great sigh, it’s a tale and a half so it is, and I saw he thought he was going to Scheherazade it with me, and I could see how that might suit my purpose too, if I could get him so carried away that he might walk to a spot something deserted. 

The intricacies of the business need not detain us here. But the long and the short of it was, he bitterly regretted dealing falsely with Hector and me, and he wept. Through these plausible tears, he hoped he might be forgiven, because in a sense he had passed sentence of transportation upon himself. I asked how that might be, and he said he had joined up as a volunteer with an expedition, departing on the morrow from Greenhithe, that meant a year in the Polar Sea, and was to find a passage through to the great Pacific. I said derisively that I did not believe him, but he reply’d, very earnest, that the greatest explorers and map-makers of our time were sure it was so, and after that somewhat damp and chilly episode up the North-Western Territories, the ship’s company would be allowed to dry out in the Sandwich Islands. Remember the Sandwich Islands, he said, clutching my lapel a little desperate, that you read me that gallus grand story of? And the pictures? Oahu. Maui. It sounds nice. I could make a bit of a fortune there, bring it back to you and Hector in recompense— 

Hector was sentenced to fourteen years transportation, I interrupted. You saw it as well as I. If he comes back, he comes back as a man of forty. They’ll have sent him to the Bermuda Docks, because he’s tall and strong. Nobody comes home from there. Judges have grown delicate, since our grandfathers’ day, and prefer the white glove to the black cap: why hang thirteen stone and six foot of beef and lay it in lime when you can wring a few months or years of slave labour out of it, and then say, why, the man—would I call it a man? the creature stole a bale or two of broadcloth, and died of fever on a hulk, that was natural causes, not hanged by the neck until he be dead, I am a very civilized Justice, that never passes the capital sentence except in cases of outright murder— 

With this speech I backed him into a shadowy spot between a bridge and some stairs up to the Roman Road. He looked terrified, which set me afire with some bastard brother to lust. I kissed him, or rather, I chewed at his face, and showed my silvery smile again to get him to turn round. He thought, poor dolt, that a b—ring might be the price of his freedom, so he let me have him up the a—e. As I finished with him I brought out my knife once more and stuck it where I thought, from my boyhood memory of where a hog’s lay, was his heart. I was lucky, or precise in recollection, I know not which, but I thought, as he crumpled up, that I knew now where to stab a man to stab him through the heart, and that is not an insignificant piece of knowledge, or one easily let go. 

To f—k, and then to kill, little death followed by big, surely this is human life reduced to a pure essence, all superfluity burned off: I had done it all, and yet I was still here, with life in front of me. In those weeklies that I read to Con, there were stories of savage warriors who ate the hearts of their enemies, not out of sheer depravity, but to honour them by absorbing their valour. Well, there was not much valour to be had from Con Hickey’s chicken heart, but I was beginning to see how I might make use of his carcase. Not the dead thing itself—that I stripped of its valuables, replaced them with stones and bits of scrap to weight it, and pushed into the canal. Then on a second thought, I threw in the watch, tobacco pouch, pipe and finger-rings after it, keeping only the coin. I did not stay to watch the body sink. 

I was as sure as a man could be that I had not been seen in the commission of these horrid, vital acts. My hands were sticky, so I dabbled them. Most of the blood had been absorbed by my rusty-brown coat, and did not show for what it was in the dusk. It would be some little time before the corpse bloated and rose again, and it would not then look much like Con Hickey, or like a man at all. And if it were known that Cornelius Hickey had mustered, as expected, in good time, aboard the—what was it, yes, _Terror_ , a good name, then the thing in the canal could not be Cornelius Hickey, and I, best of all, would be beyond the reach of any constable, set fair for the Sandwich Islands—with a little polar interlude, but I was used to the cold, what had been my childhood in a cellar on Back Irk Street but a polar interlude? And what need I stay with the ship once it reached the warm shores of Oahu, Maui? I could hook it, dry out and warm up, and then seek passage to Bermuda—perhaps Hector could be bought out of his captivity: weren’t colonials famous for their greasy fists? It would all take a year or so, but Hector was tough, I had confidence in his survival. A year is nothing. 

Excited so by this, I had to moderate my pace the mile and a half back to Limehouse, so as not to appear to be in flight. I slipped into the doss-house when another lodger entered, made my way up to Con’s room, that had once been mine and Hector’s too, and forced the door. Sure enough, there in the gloom was his kit, neatly packed, orders atop it. I took the paper to the window to catch the very last of the light. We sailed in the morning: I was saved, and made! Hickey was to have been a caulker's mate, and now I should be one. I was not sure what it entailed; plugging up holes all day, I supposed. Well, I was practised enough at that. I flattered myself I was something better-looking than that fat ass Hickey, but we were of a height and an age, had similar colouring. Masters are blind to the ordinary differences in feature between the men they employ, we are a lump to them. Naval officers were surely the same, if not more so. All I had to do was dress in his clothes, and make my way to Greenhithe. 

A cracked voice behind me said, Cornelius? It was the blind uncle. Just my luck to have coincided with his yearly perambulation about the house. Perhaps he knew of Con’s plan, and was coming to say adieu—anyway, it was a chance to try my hand at the brogue. Yes, uncle? says I, what do you out of bed? 

You’re not Con, he roared, you’re the other one. What's your name, weaselly Lancashire fella, who was after running off into the country? 

Well, I had my answer regarding the brogue. Still, a fellow could be born in Limerick, and grow up in Manchester, and have the accents of the latter place. That was near enough to Hector’s case, and should become my story. Yes, yes, I said quickly. That’s right. I only call you uncle as a mark of respect. I’m back now, and Con and I are taking a little trip together across the water. He’ll be up presently to say farewell, and seek your blessing. 

He’ll not f—ing get it, the bowsy, growled the old man. Leaving me to fend for myself and I a blind cripple seventy years of age last Candlemas. He can f—ing whistle out of his f—ing hole, so he can. He jerked his head in agitation, dislodging the nightcap I had never before seen him without. He bent down groping for it. I stepped forward to pick it up for him, but was brought up short by the sight of his scalp, which was barely a scalp at all, but a ridged, livid mass of scars, grey and pink and violet, stretching down to the collar of his gown. In the dim light I fancied the top of his skull had been sliced away, and the pale bloody brain exposed, though of course this was not so. His left ear, too, was a mere withered ruff, and what I had always assumed a birthmark disfiguring his left cheek formed part of the same injury. I must have made some startled noise, because he barked, Are you looking at my f—ing head? 

I could not deny it, and he told me that in ancient times the O'Hickeys were famous for their skill in surgery, that one of them put a silver plate into the head of Brian Boru hisself, when he was wounded in battle. I returned the brocade cap, black and foul with grease, which from its style could not be much younger than the ruined head on which it habitually sat. 

But that's not what this is, I stammered. 

No, he said. He jabbed my breast. This is not that. Do you know how it is done? They make a dunce's hat for you of stiff canvas or hard brown paper, they fill it with boiling pitch, and they cram it onto your head and set it burning again. It's the worst pain in the world, I saw boys dash their heads against a stone wall to try and escape it. As least you think it is, until they let the pitch set, and tear the hat off your blistered scalp. 

Why, I reply'd, who? When? 

The Militia, he said. In the '98. To get you to talk. But a man would say he was the Empress of Aby-f—ing-ssinia with his own private hell scorching through to the brainpan itself. And of course they already knew all we had to spill. They did it for sport. 

I had no reply. Gravely, he covered his head again. Tell that worthless nephew of mine godspeed and I'll say a novena for him. Our Lady is Stella Maris, the refuge of sailors, he said, and tapped away down the passage to his own apartment, disappearing into the gloom. 

And so I had all the blessing that Con Hickey could have hoped for. I put on the dear departed's shirt, stockings, breeches and coat, noting that a spell of pimping had, contrary to expectation, improved his wardrobe, then rolled up my own blood-stained garments and shoved them into the chimney, and as I did I had the queerest sense of rolling up my own past selves, my half-dozen names that all began with the same initial letters, to burn them up like a cigaret. As I mused upon this curious notion, I realised I was gasping for just that, and tore a strip off Hickey's order papers to make myself one. 

As I arranged the tobacco I contemplated upon the similarities between my present case and carnal congress. Men say of a woman they have f—kt that they have possessed her, as if they were spirits stealing into her body to rob her of any honour that was left there. What is honour? It's a word, certainly. I have never f—kt a woman, but men enough, and they kept their own selves after my p—k left their a—es. 

All but this last man. Cornelius Hickey. Conchobar Ó hÍceadha. I wondered, and wished I had thought to ask, if all Irish folk have two names like that, so England, in making Ireland a vassal, only doubled her population, giving every man and woman a Gaelic ghost. Now I was taking possession of both of him, the Irish and the English, sealing the breach left by his death, consuming his double soul. Perhaps only one such as I, who was never baptized, who never had a Christian name nor a father’s proper surname to take on, who thus is a bloody heathen and an insubstantial spectre at once, could do such a thing. It is true, I think, what the black cannibals believed, for I felt that I had the strength of two, at least—of three, of ten, maybe. What is a man, if not his name? I stepped into Cornelius Hickey's boots, struck a lucifer off the left heel, and lit my smoke. 

Well, now, so far my story. The boat is on the drift, and the ship she’s on the wave. Breathe a prayer and shed a tear for me as you pass by, and so I take my leave. I have been many things in my four-and-twenty years of life, and shall be a few more things before I die, but not forgotten. 

Remember me: my name is Cornelius Hickey, and I wish you, good people all, good day.

**Author's Note:**

> clem: to starve
> 
> Croppy: an insurgent, especially from the Catholic working class, during the 1798 uprising against British rule in Ireland.
> 
> scavenger: a child labourer who collected cotton waste from under the spinning mules in a cotton mill.
> 
> prigging: theft
> 
> cigarets: hardly known in England in this period, but a thing in France. I had to account for Hickey's cigarettes in the show somehow.
> 
> casual wards: temporary workhouse  
> accommodation.
> 
> farrantly: good-looking
> 
> If you think you recognise Fred and Mary, you're right, but if you don't it doesn't matter a bit.
> 
> pure: dog turd, used in the curing process for glove leather. 
> 
> The Liberator: Daniel O'Connell, Irish nationalist politician who secured Catholic Emancipation. He recommended that Irish speakers learn English to improve employment and other prospects.
> 
> Bermuda: between 1823 and 1863 over 9,000 British and Irish transportees were sent to Bermuda, and used principally in building the Royal Naval Dockyard. Conditions were notoriously brutal.
> 
> flashman: something between a pimp and a bouncer
> 
> white glove: in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, if a court session produced no capital sentences, it was known as a 'maiden session', and the judge might be presented with a pair of white kid gloves. Slightly antique for the 1840s, but it makes a good line.
> 
> one of them put a silver plate into the head of Brian Boru hisself: my invention, but in the later medieval period the Ó hÍceadha family were hereditary physicians to the O'Briens of Thomond, and as well as being traditionally celebrated for their experiments in cranial surgery, translated several medical treatises into Irish.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Morals & Practicals (the King James I remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20498012) by [darkrosaleen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkrosaleen/pseuds/darkrosaleen)




End file.
